Crossroads Poetics

This collection of essays on twentieth-century poetry and poetics is written from a wide-ranging perspective, working analytically and comparatively with literature, music, video, film, architecture and performance art. Bringing together readings of Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Louis Feuillade, Rosmarie Waldrop, Frank Zappa, Bill Viola and Pierre Alechinsky, this book attempts to delineate the possibility of a truly transversal poetics, one which creates a space for a reconsideration of contemporary poetics while navigating the complex interactions between the theory and practice. Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liege, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. His previous books include The American Prose Poem (1998), J.G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (2001; with Pierre Michel), Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (2005; with Andrew Norris), and Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (2009). He has also co-edited ten volumes of essays and published more than one hundred articles on literature and the arts. He is the author of two poetry collections: Entre la poire et le fromage (2013) and Le troisieme corps (2004), which was recently published in English as Third Body (2009). His awards include the SAMLA Book Award, the Choice Outstanding Book Award, the Leon Guerin Prize and the Alumni Award of the Belgian American Educational Foundation. As a musician, he has recorded and toured worldwide with various bands and collaborated with many jazz and avant-rock musicians including Dave Liebman, Elton Dean, Harry Beckett, Annie Whitehead, Dagmar Krause, Ed Mann and Chris Cutler. He has been signed to the New York-based label Moonjune Records (www.moonjune.com) since 2005.